The following java script code will allow you to add all of your friends at once without having to click on them individually when you want ot share a fan page or group page.

javascript:elms=document.getElementById(‘friends’).getElementsByTagName(‘li’);for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === ‘object’){fs.click(elms[fid]);}}

Now how to use it. Follow these 2 simple steps and you will be sharing your pages with all of your friends in no time:

1. First select the share link below the page or group logo on the left. Follow the screenshot below for guidance.

Step 2. Add the code provided above to the URL bar and then hit “enter”. For guidance please see the screenshot below:

With this code you will be able to quickly increase your fan base. Remember it takes 25 fans before you can secure your vanity URL. Then it’s just a constant work in progress to get new fans and to get those fans involved in your page. We will provide further tips on how you can utilize Facebook to increase your marketing efforts in the future to stay tuned.

]]> http://www.burnseo.com/blog/2010/08/code-to-share-fan-and-group-pages-with-all-friends/feed/ 0 http://www.burnseo.com/blog/2010/08/what-is-seo/ http://www.burnseo.com/blog/2010/08/what-is-seo/#comments Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:07:45 +0000 admin http://www.burnseo.com/blog/?p=121 Here is a VERY brief image complete with a cute mini infographic at the bottom. For the newbies to online marketing here you go!

Customers, who do an intelligent search for specific markets, are sure to land on your web site, with any of the mix of keywords. It’s interesting that these keywords do not must be in reading order. As an example, if you type in “football club” Google can list all the possible soccer clubs in the world. The same is true if you type in “club football.” Google will list all the probabilities associating with the two words. Google reads it as 2 independent words and additionally as a phrase together. There are shoppers, who might not do an intelligent search, but still appears to land on the dealer’s web page. As an example, somebody would possibly type “Flowers will bring ladies” if someone desires to know the way to win women. Google can list the doable outcome when you perform dealer seo. Really, the correct English sentence ought to be “Flowers can attract ladies”. But, we don’t seem to be learning English to become masters of the web. We have a tendency to need to suppose like marketers to look for opportunities and bring sales.

Supposing, in the earlier example, if the phrase is indeed true “Flowers will bring ladies” then you have got already discovered a possible market, even if the English sentence is wrong. Along the approach, you discover that a share of individuals have an interest to buy white flowers only. You simply hit the jackpot of a distinct segment market, as a result of a little percentage will mean some thousand people. That’s a lot of growth potential for a tiny business. Now that you have a glimpse of what the keyword tool analysis software can do, let me let tell you the opposite aspect of this issue. Keywords do facilitate marketers to narrow down to specific markets. Even after you have got accomplished going for that specific market, and you still don’t see sales coming back in, what do you are doing? Bear in mind that the number of clicks on your online page will not mean the quantity of sales. It simply suggests that your website is viewed only unless the person decides to shop for from a dealership seo built within that web page. In that same online page, you’ll be able to really build up a list of folks who signed up to your website. You may raise, what’s the list for, since they could not wish to buy your product? Think like a marketer. You would possibly not have the sales in nevertheless for that item, but you have got new stockpile of list.

You recognize that the money is in the list. Your keyword tool research did not attend a waste. It has indirectly designed another list of potential customers who might be interested in different products, not essentially related to your niche market. Does one get the image of the facility of internet marketing? How else do you’re thinking that, millionaires created it through? When you use keywords, you are harvesting customers, who are the gold nuggets of your internet business. To find out more concerning internet promoting, what you wish to try to to is establish a proper system, starting with the inbox cash. George Paul is vivid internet marketer and promoting many affiliate products and services on line. Previous to this, he was working with an international American Oilfield company. He was doing well within the oil sector and was earning part-time residual income together with his online business. He enjoys playing laptop games, taking note of music, and even play the electrical guitar. He majors in blues, rock and metal, as a rhythm and lead guitarist. He likes to read books, particularly on internet promoting, email promoting, and improving techniques on guitar playing. He had quit his full time job and is now focusing more on internet selling business.

I still see webmasters putting up sites where they are spamming the hell out of the keyword meta tag even now. I love it. This, among many other factors that are readily apparent, tells me that my competition really does very little to keep up with what is happening in the industry.

As many of you reading this know full well, the business of search engine optimization is an ever changing one that requires diligent research and personal testing to verify what techniques and practices are actually effective.

Bing, yahoo, Google, and others have all publicly stated in no uncertain terms that the meta keyword field is useless for search engine optimization. If you still don’t believe me have a look at Matt Cutts telling you in his own words:

• Yahoo announced at the SMX East in New York last October that they had not supported the meta keyword tag for some months.
• Bing has never supported the keyword meta tag.

Many webmasters including BurnSEO have tested the keyword meta tag by creating a new site and only placing a token identifier in the meta tag. what did we find? Well the search engines to indeed index a site with only a keyword meta tag identifier and display it in their search results. Does this mean they are all lying to us and that the keyword meta tag is used in their search ranking algorithms? NO.

What it does tell us is that they do still index the content of the meta keyword field. In all likelihood this field is either A) not part of the hundreds of factors used in ranking a website or B) One of, if not the lowest ranking factor being used for website SERP ranking.

Do we still use the meta keyword tag? Yes. We it useful, since the tag does exist to still utilize the meta keyword field in a very minimal way. Since the field does exist and it is not (at least of the date this article was written) harming your website in anyway, then why not still utilize the field? Spamming this meta field is clearly a futile waste of a webmasters time, however responsibly utilizing an existing meta tag field seems to make perfect sense.

Clearly it’s far more important to know what keywords you are going after and to integrate those keyword into your sites navigation, content, and meta tags. Giving all of those keywords away in a devalued meta field may be something webmasters should think twice about, however.

We look forward to hearing any thoughts or findings you may have on the topic.

Often copying the code over from the written tutorial was cause for further issues.

WordPress is such a popular and powerful blogging platform that any website can benefit from implementing it. We have found that there is surprisingly little information available on how to easily accomplish this task. The average person is not a PHP guru and may need some assistance in pointing out what needs to be done in order to seamlessly integrate WordPress into their website.

In an effort to further aid the community in easily integrating WordPress into your existing website, we have now documented through a short video how to integrate WordPress into any existing website within 10 minutes!

Follow the step by step instructions in the video below and you can integrate WordPress into any existing website you may have. It doesn’t matter if it’s a CMS or straight HTML website!

If you read the written tutorial you can get an idea of what is needed in order to setup a placeholder blog that you can work from.

Also please remember to delete all the old code once your done working with the individual files. It is shown in all steps except the header.php file in the video. Before saving scroll down and delete all your old code you didn’t use!

You may want to take a peek at the written tutorial on how to integrate wordpress into your existing website before starting.

We hope you find this video useful and look forward to producing more useful tutorials for you in the future. Please don’t forget to leave feedback and link us to view your successful integrations!

If you have any suggestions on future tutorials you would like to see please drop us a line and give us your suggestions.

Now lets integrate WordPress into your site…

Many of our readers have requested that we provide a detailed write up of how to integrate a WordPress blog into any existing website. We are going to show you step by step how to get a working WordPress installation seamlessly integrated into your current website. It doesn’t matter if you are using Joomla, Drupal, or straight HTML, this write up will work for your website too!

Okay lets start by talking about some preparations you need to make. We need to make sure that you have installed WordPress on your host. For the purposes of this tutorial we will install WordPress under the /blog directory. So we are clear your WordPress installation should be found at www.yourwebsite.com/blog. This should be a standard WordPress install, nothing special is required from the installation standpoint.

Once you can see the default WordPress blog on your site at www.yourwebsite.com/blog, then we can begin the customization, excited yet?

First thing we want to do is log into the admin area and make sure you have the WordPress theme set to the default theme. Now pull down all the .PHP files we are going to edit from the host. Navigate through your favorite FTP program to the following location: /yourwebsite.com/blog/wp-content/themes/default/. From here you will want to move the following file to your desktop (or whichever folder you will use to house the files while you edit them):

• header.php
• index.php
• footer.php
• single.php
• comments.php

Now lets make sure you have a page setup on your site for the blog. This will be the “template” page you will use during your customization. If using HTML just make sure you have a page that you can actually visit for the blog at www.yoursite.com/blog. Leave the space where the blog content will go empty except for the text “blog content here”. Also make sure you have a space for your sidebar and write the text “sidebar here” so you can find it later as we edit the WordPress theme with this template. Below is a graphic example of what the blog “template” page could look like:

Now right click on your template page and view the source. From the view source page press Control+A to highlight all the text. Now press Control+C to copy the text. Open up a blank HTML file in your HTML/PHP editor (we will use Dreamweaver from now on for this tutorial). Go to the code page of your editor and delete everything so you have a blank canvass. Now press Control+V to paste the details of your template page into this new document.

EDIT THE HEADER.PHP FILE

1. Open up the header.php file in Dreamweaver. In the code you will want to delete everything after the initial

Use the screen shot below if your unsure:

2. Now go to your template you copied earlier and view the source. You should copy everything over exactly as it is. Start at the top and copy everything down to the area just before where your main body content for the blog will start. This will vary depending on your particular website layout, but it will work regardless. Once you have copied everything you consider to be the “header” from your template paste it into the header.php file. You can delete the title meta tag you copied from your template and replace with the the following one that you can find in the original header file:

In addition you can paste the following code from the original header.php code and place it in the meta area of your copied template code:

3. Since the blog is located in a sub directory we highly recommend making sure you input the full URL address to the files specified in all the meta tag info of your header.php file. For example

would become

Once you have done this for all the meta URL’s, you can save this file and transfer it to your host Copy over the header.php file in the default theme folder we discussed earlier.

EDIT THE INDEX.PHP FILE

1. Open the index.php file and delete everything after the inital PHP call for the header (leave that intact). Go back to your template code and copy EVERYTHING directly after the header area you copied ealier and UP TO the footer. Take this code and paste into the index.php file after the initial PHP header call. Now search your new index.php file and find the content filler text on your template that we suggest earlier. We used the text “blog content here”. Find that text and in it’s place paste the following code:

Good job your almost halfway done!

2. Now make sure you go to the very end of the code of the index.php file and paste the following code as the LAST LINE OF CODE for the index.php file:

3. The last thing you will have to do with the index.php file is find the filler text you used for your sidebar. Remember that we used the text “sidebar here”. Find that text and in it’s place past the following code:

you might have to place a div or paragraph tag around this one and center it or align it left or right depending on your taste.

EDIT THE FOOTER.PHP FILE

1. Open the footer.php file. You can delete everything AFTER the initial PHP call. Go back to your template and copy everything after your index text down to the last code on this page. Paste this code after the initial PHP call in the footer.php file. before the /body tag you will want to insert the following code:

if you would like to support WordPress or want to display the feed information in your footer you can paste the following code anywhere appropriate in your footer file (it’s not required to work so feel free to not include this if you don’t want to):

Okay now you have the basic blog customized to your website! you can overwrite the header.php, index.php and footer.php files in the default wordpress theme folder on your host. If you refresh the page you should see your working blog integrated with your site design! Great work, but not quite done yet…

EDIT SINGLE.PHP FILE

You want to copy everything from your new index.php into the single.php file. Highlight the WordPress code we told you to paste into the index.php file earlier and delete it. in it’s place replace it with this new code:

Keep the rest of the code in tact, you are only swapping out the main content code here. only replace the exact PHP code we told you to insert originally with this one. The last code should still be the call for the footer.php file as it is in the index.php file.

EDIT THE COMMENT.PHP FILE

Open the comment.php file and look for this line of code:

You will want to decrease the cols value to something lower than 100%. I suggest 75%-80% and see if that fits well with the site.

Now overwrite the single.php file and the comments.php file and go back and view an actual blog post on your site. It should look nice and pretty now.

At this point you have succesfully integrated a fully functional WordPress blog into your website. It now looks and functions exactly as the rest of your site does. You can go into your WordPress admin and install plugins and widgets to your hearts content!

if we missed anything or you have any other suggestions for future tutorials don’t hesistate to give us a suggestion! We welcome any feedback.

*12/02/2009 Edited the tutorial with code in the header.php that was causing a parse error. Also we highly recommend the use of SEO plugins to help with the meta tags once your blog is up and running. Happy blogging!

Content Management Systems (CMS) are nothing more than a set of files designed to assist in the creation, storage, and manipulation of website data. Web Content Management Systems (WCMS) are able to handle all types of internet files such as HTML, PHP, Flash, Java, and more.

CMS’s have evolved greatly over the last ten years. With today’s open source (free) content management systems it is possible for someone with limited knowledge of website programming to make a functioning website for their personal or business use.

In this article we will attempt to show the strengths and the weaknesses of the two most popular CMS systems that are freely available on the market today and what types of website should consider using them.

Joomla!

Joomla! has become one of the most widely used CMS systems for website designers, especially over the last three years. The Joomla project grew out of open source development of an older CMS platform known as Mambo. Joomla emerged in 2005 and has quickly become the top CMS platform and most downloaded for a variety many reasons. Below we will look at the top three reasons Joomla! has experienced such Worldwide success.

1. Out of the box functional website

Joomla is very easy to install and setup. Because of the module based nature of Joomla! and the fact that it is template driven, a website owner is literally able to setup a Joomla! installation and have a working website up in less than 30 minutes. The flexibility of Joomla is evident when one delves into customizing even the free templates that are integrated within the standard Joomla! installation. Because it is so easy to install and customize, Joomla! is a fully functional CMS that can be utilized by nearly any vertical market large or small.

Some of the most well known sites using Joomla! as their content management system today include big players such as:

• MTV Networks Quizilla (Social networking) – http://www.quizilla.com
• IHOP (Restaurant chain) – http://www.ihop.com
• Harvard University (Educational) – http://gsas.harvard.edu
• Citibank (Financial institution intranet) – Not publicly accessible
• The Green Maven (Eco-resources) – http://www.greenmaven.com
• Outdoor Photographer (Magazine) – http://www.outdoorphotographer.com
• PlayShakespeare.com (Cultural) – http://www.playshakespeare.com
• Senso Interiors (Furniture design) – http://www.sensointeriors.co.za

No matter how big or how small your website is going to be, it is wise for someone considering a CMS system to take a hard look at Joomla as your first choice. Once you begin to recognize the true power and flexibility of the Joomla! CMS platform it is very difficult to deny why it has become the top CMS platform in the world.

2. Ease of administration

Many people have very little knowledge of HTML, PHP, CSS, and other web based programming languages. This is why many website designers have begun to favor the Joomla! CMS platform. The front end administration of Joomla! is very well organized and simple to navigate. With one training call with your clients, a web designer is able to effectively show the website owner how to add, remove, and change content easily. As long as the user has some experience with Microsoft Word, they will have no problem at all using the Joomla administration panel to manage their websites.

This ease of use is what we rate the #2 best feature of the Joomla! CMS platform is for both web designers and end users.

Advanced programmers are still able to access the .PHP files directly and modify them in any way they see fit. This is why the Joomla! platform is also so popular with website designers.

3. Diverse community developed extensions

This final point should not be overlooked. There are thousands upon thousands of user developed free and commercial extensions for the Joomla! platform. Extension for Joomla! can be found for virtually any need one may have with a website. Extension range from things as small as adding Google tracking code to your site easily to as large as a complete community management system.

Joomla! extensions have been developed specifically to help many vertical markets needs such as realtors, car salesment, and most importantly e-commerce. As was uncovered in our last blog about Joomla! it’s even possible to buy an extension that integrates a WordPress blog into your Joomla! website installation.

Drawbacks To Joomla!

The biggest drawback we have found to date with Joomla is that it has not been able to truly integrate the power of other CMS systems such as Worpress into it’s existing website installation. We get around this by integrating WordPress manually into the Joomla! website, however many people find this too difficult to do on their own. For those people there is a pay extension available that integrates WordPress fairly well into Joomla!. It is not 100% complete integration, but it is good enough in most cases.

WordPress

WordPress is a system that has been around since 2001. Most people did not start actively using WordPress until 2005 with their version 1.5 release that introduced themes. In 2005 their 1.5 version was downloaded 900,000 times. In 2009 estimates put WordPress downloads well above 4 million!

WordPress has grown for a standard blogging platform into a fully functional content management system in it’s own right. Worpress.com is available to host blogs for those that want the absolute simplest method of blogging software. WordPress.org is where one can download the WordPress software that is needed to install on your host.

The top three reason for the success of WordPress include:

1. King of the blogging hill

WordPress is the undefeated, one of a kind, king of the hill blogging platform. WordPress simply has no equal when it comes to a powerful, SEO ready, scalable blogging system. With social media and social marketing becoming an ever increasing part of of every business’s marketing strategy, it is clear why WordPress has gained such a huge dominance in the marketplace for blogging software.

Because of the incredible community participation is the WordPress project, with the help of plugins and administrator customization, it’s quite possible for a website owner to create an entire site using nothing but the WordPress CMS platform for both static pages and dynamic blogging. As WordPress further develops it will surely gain even more footing over more popular CMS platforms such as Joomla! for complete website CMS .

2. diverse community developed plugins

The community has many free and pay commercial plugins that help to customize and extend the basic functionality of WordPress. Thanks to these unique plugins and other Worpress hacks, website owners are able to utilize WordPress installation as a one stop CMS for small and large website projects alike.

Some popular blogs you may not have known were powered by WordPress include:

• Anderson Cooper’s AC 360′s blog
• John Chow’s marketing blog
• Rosie Odonnell’s blog (ack….)

3. simple administration interface

Wodpress has bar none one of the most straightforward, no nonsense user interfaces of any CMS you will ever see. The WordPress administration is elegant and at the same time powerful. Without having any programming knowledge at all, a website designer’s client would likely be able to figure out how to navigate and blog using the WordPress administration panel easily.

The WordPress administration interface is one of those areas where a programmer can learn a valuable lesson. KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID! Website owners with no knowledge of programming can very easily manipulate their way to blogging utopia using the simple administration of WordPress. There really isn’t much more to say then wonder at the simple glory of the WordPress administration interface people!

Drawbacks To WordPress

Okay so WordPress hasn’t exactly grown into a fully functional out of the box CMS platform for website development. Most website owners needing an in depth website platform will find themselves very frustrated with the limitations that WordPress has for them. The “out of the box” website is simply not there yet for WordPress.

User created hacks and plugins however greatly enhance the flexibility and scalability of WordPress as a full fledged content management system. For those not at least somewhat familiar with HTML or PHP, you may not be ready to try your hand at using WordPress as a one stop shop for your website development needs. WordPress is clearly on a path to becoming a full CMS platform and every year they are making leaps and bounds with the out of the box functionality of the WordPress platform.

There is no doubt that one day WordPress will rival Joomla!, Drupal, and other CMS platforms for dominance.

As it stands today website owners must evaluate the needs of their websites before deciding on a CMS platform to work from. At the highest level we recommend WordPress to anyone with a website that will be heavy on social media and blogging. Joomla! is often the first choice for static and dynamic scalable websites that may have special needs depending on your vertical market.

We welcome the insights and comments of others using these two powerful platforms and your thoughts on how to help others determine which platform is the right one for them.

We have been using Joomla! primarily for website developement because of the advantages it offers with regard to content display. The main problem we have run into is that it does not offer a robust blogging system that can come close to the speed, flexibility, and robustness of WordPress. To remedy the situation we have learned how to completely integrate WordPress into a Joomla! website installation so that you can get the best of both worlds!

Before getting into detail about how this is done it’s important to understand exactly what Joomla! and WordPress should are best at. For basic sites or Blogger only sites one may not even need to bother with Joomla! as WordPress has evolved into a fairly sophisticated CMS in it’s own right, however it still is not as complete in this regard as Joomla!

Joomla! is probably the best CMS (content management system) available to designers today. Because it is open source it has support from thousands of talented programmers that have added to the core functionality of Joomla! in what seems to be a never ending variety fo ways. Joomla! is a module based templated CMS platform. This is where it shines over WordPress as Content can be placed in any of the preset module positions that are designed for both static and dynamic content. There are many pre-made templates available for free that allow unbelievable flexibility in the way that content can be displayed through your web portal.

Additional functionality such as community management, message boards, ecommerce, rating systems, twitter interations, facebook integrations, etc.. are all very simple upgrades for a Joomla! installation. Once one fully understands the incredible power of the CMS platform, the ease with which it is manipulated and added to is incredible. Designers are free to make custom templates and easily port WordPress or basic HTML websites into Joomla! templates. All of these features mentioned are free to anyone with the time and the talent to learn how to master Joomla!

Joomla!, for all it’s great flexibility still has some shortcomings. One of the most obvious shortcomings is it’s inability to produce a serious blogging platform that would rival WordPress. There are several plugins available that try to provide blogging integration for Joomla, but the only one that even attempts to rival WordPress is still in beta and is not free.

WordPress has long been known to be the king of blogging software. Many people today use WordPress to manage their entire website. WordPress is complete capable of being used in this way. In the future we expect that WordPress will be developed to rival Joomla! in it’s ability to be used as a complete and fully functional CMS. For the time being WordPress is limited in it’s ability to fully function as a dynamic web portal in the way that Joomla! is. Today one can setup a complete website designed using wordpress software complete with static web pages and Blogging functionality, even ecommerce and more. WordPress is faster and more lightweight that Joomla! which is always a plus for a web design. When it comes to a fully functional Blogging system there is no match… WordPress is king.

If you are looking to build yourself a small site or one that is geared specifically toward being a Blog, then this article may not be for you since a pure WordPress installation will be just fine for your needs. If you require the full functionality of Joomla! for your website deign, but still want to have the power of WordPress Bloggings software integrated into your website design… then please read on!

The best part of both Joomla! and WordPress is that they are both free open source software. Anyone with the skills to master the software can design stunning websites completely free of charge. This is why both of these softwares are so popular around the world today.

There are many plugins that will provide blogging features for a Joomla! website, but some people require more!

In order to install WordPress onto a Joomla! installation we recommend installing the software into a subdirectory such as yourwebsite.com/blog. This will ensure that none of your Joomla! files will be conflicting with the WordPress files.

Once the WordPress files are complety installed simply continue to setup the WordPress installation as you would any normal WordPress install.

Now you will have access to the WordPress blog by visiting your blog URL at mywebsite.com/blog. You can customize the WordPress template through your admin section of your WordPress installation. Customizing the WordPress installation to match your Joomla! website may be the most challenging part for people that are not well versed in PHP code and website design. You may need the assistance of a professional in order to exactly match the WordPress template to your Joomla! website template. For an experiened website designer however, this will only take a short while to complete. If you need assistance with this please contact us. We will write a tutorial on how to completely customize the default WordPress template to match ANY Joomla! template in the near future. In the meantime please contact us directly if you need asssistance.

Once the WordPress installation has been made to look like the rest of your website (by modifying the header.php,index.php,footer.php,single.php, and comments.php files in the WordPress themes folder) you simply have to link the mywebsite.com/blog URL as an external link in your Joomla! menu.

Now you have the best of both worlds. A Joomla! website that is completely integrated with a powerful WordPress blog.

You can customize the WordPress blog with your favorite widgets and plugins just as you would any other WordPress installation. We highly recommend submitting a second Sitemap to Google Webmaster tools for your Blog since you will already have one for your main Joomla! website content.

Sit back and start enjoying the benefits of a well optimized website and powerful Blogging software which will help you in your efforts of dominating your market!

Example Joomla/WordPress Blog Integrations:

• http://www.burnseo.com/blog
• http://fivestarsmortgage.com/blog
• http://www.nfmmortgage.com/blog
• http://www.harddmoneyloans.com/blog

The first thing you should evaluate when considering if Stumble Upon will be right for your needs is your goals. If you are looking to get lots of new business and convert visitors into qualified sales opportunities then chances are that Stumble Upon may not meet those needs directly.

I say directly because INDIRECTLY, Stumble Upon is able to provide valuable links to your business when used properly which can help with link popularity for your site and ultimately assist in your search engine optimization ranking results.

Stumble Upon is great at bringing lots of traffic to your site. Many of those users will find your content useful and will therefore link back to it. This is where Stumble Upon shines above many of the other social media sites available today in our opinion.

GETTING STARTED

Stumble Upon is very simple to use. When you sign up as a member we highly recommend downloading the SU toolbar as this will make it much easier for you to network and share content through SU in the future. In a moment we will get into how to properly utilize the toolbar. Before you can get into those specifics however, it is important to understand how to gain a large network in SU, which will provide a solid foundation for pushing your content amongst the SU Universe.

GROW YOUR NETWORK

As with any social media site, networking and connecting with friends that share similar interest is key to your success. SU makes it fairly easy to build a large community of friends that share similar interest to you. Before adding friends you should personalize your profile. When you are logged into your profile click on home and you will see the “preferences” link on the far right of your toolbar. Use this link to put your personal details, links to your other social media profiles, and most importantly your interest. It’s important to update your interests as they change since this will help other SU users that share your interest connect with you, in turn growing your community.

As you can see, when you view another users profile SU is kind enough to tell you very quickly how compatible you are likely to be for each other based upon your interests and stumbling history. This saves you the time of having to look through each users entire portfolio of stumbles. Once you find someone that is close enough to your interest for your satisfaction, adding them as a friend is also very simple. Simply use the “Send friend request” found at the bottom of the users info on the right hand side of the screen. This will send an email request to the user who will in turn review you and either accept or deny you as a friend. Once they accept you as a friend you are both connected and can easily share content with one another.

Building up a large network of friends is a must for maximizing SU’s potential. It is recommended that you make a habit of adding new friends as often as possible. Each friend that you are viewing will also have a list of their friends. It’s likely that someone that is compatible with you will also have somewhat compatible friends in their network. SU shows you a list of their friends making it easy for you to sift through their networking and sending friends request to as many of their connected friends as you like. SU does have a daily limit and if you add too many friends in one day you will get a lovely message from SU telling you to take it easy and that you are adding too many friends at one time.

USING STUMBLE UPON

Now that you understand what SU is great for and how to build up your network, lets take a look at how to easily add content and share it properly.

As we mentioned earlier in the article, we highly recommend the use of the SU toolbar for your everyday stumbling/sharing/commenting.

The Toolbar makes it simple for you to use SU in your everyday web surfing. When your browser is open you will be able to see how many shares your friends have sent to you easily. Simply press the button next to the numbers to view the pages that your friends have shared with you. While viewing the page you can choose to “like”, “dislike”, or do nothing with the shared page. Use the thumbs up or thumbs down button if you like the content. We recommend not using the dislike button if you want to stay on good terms with your friends. If someone sends you something offensive (which can be weeded out through the parental control in your preferences) or that you otherwise don’t like it’s much easier to remove the friend from your list then to start a negative chain by down voting their content.

If you have time it’s always nice if you can leave a comment on the pages your friends refer to you using the comment button on the toolbar. This will take you to a page where you can see all the other comments on this page as well as leave your own comment.

These simple actions of up-voting and commenting your friends shares will help you become recognized by your friends. Leave them a note to let them know that you up-voted and shared their stumble so that when you share your content with them they will be more likely to return the favor.

Sharing a new blog post or web page is very simple. All you have to do is click the up-vote button while viewing a web page and you will be able to add the details of the page to your Stumbles where you can share it with your network of friends. Be sure to use proper tags and descriptions when adding your pages for maximum effectiveness.

SHARING YOUR STUMBLES BRINGS TRAFFIC!

Once you Stumble your new content, log into your Stumble Upon account and go to your home. From here you can see all your recent shares and liked pages. Find the content you want to share with your friends in the list. It will take SU a few minutes to capture your image and display it here so don’t be worries if you have the blank image for your share right now, it will populate shortly automatically.

When you hover your mouse over the page you want to share, you will get a small popup in the lower right hand corner that says “share”. Clicking this button will open up the sharing pop-up on the right hand side of your page.

You can choose to share this Stumble with select friends or click the “all” box to send it to all of your friends at once. Below the friends list you can type a custom message that will display to your friends in their SU toolbar when they view your shared Stumble on their browser. Here you can type a brief message they can view to peak their interest. It is recommended you utilize this space for maximum effectiveness of your shared Stumbles. If your friends like it they will share it with their network and so on bringing you vast amounts of traffic to your site!

It’s important to note that you should not spam your friends with every single post you make on all of your blogs. There are several reasons for this. The most important reason is that SU gives a ranking formula for each users importance. If you Stumble Content from the same site only you will be flagged as a spammer and your shares will have little weight or even worse you can be banned. Don’t let this happen to you.

Share a variety of content in your particular areas of interest to help yourself build up a reputation as an authority on the topic in your network.

BECOME AN AUTHORITY STUMBLER

There are a few tips you can use to help your shares have more weight. SU has implemented a five star system and it’s thought that the more starts your shares have, the more likely they are to pop up when people Stumble something in it’s category.

In order to be a power SU users try to follow these pointers:

• Share and Stumble a variety of good content
• Give Testimonials to other users
• Try to get as many reviews/testimonials from your friends as possible